This week, Amazon Web Services opened a new data center in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, specifically, Oregon. The data center inaugurates the US West (Oregon) AWS infrastructure region, and as such, complements the US West (N. California) Region as the second AWS region on the West coast of the United States. The US West (Oregon) Region will be priced roughly 10% lower than the US West (N. California) Region and equal in price to the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

Amazon Web Services now has seven regions that collectively serve customers in 190 countries as follows:

US West (Oregon)
US West (N. California)
US East (N. Virginia)
EU West (Dublin)
GovCloud (US)
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
Asia Pacific (Singapore)

Amazon Web Services announced the launch of the US West (Oregon) approximately a week ahead of the November 15 launch of its Amazon Kindle Fire tablet and its brand new Silk web browser. The Silk browser lives partially on the Kindle tablet and partially within Amazon’s EC2 cloud environment in a setting known as “cloud acceleration mode” that enables faster web browsing due to pre-loading of web pages that a user is likely to visit given its prior browsing history. The Kindle’s cloud acceleration mode can be turned off by the user, thereby restricting Amazon’s access to user browsing histories. In response to an outcry by privacy rights enthusiasts, the digital rights advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation reported, “We are generally satisfied with the privacy design of Silk, and happy that the end user has control over whether to use cloud acceleration.” Nevertheless, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is pushing for an upgrade to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 in order to instantiate legal protections that recognize the proliferation of cloud based technologies that store personal data.

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